A Lovers’ Chorus

A couple wakes up at home in the middle of the night. “I can’t breathe,” the woman says. “She can’t breathe,” the man repeats. They hurry to the car and drive to the hospital. What follows are agonising moments: the woman is being treated in critical condition, while the man waits in the waiting room, tormented by uncertainty. Eventually, life goes on, but what happened irrevocably changes the course of the lovers’ life together. A Lovers’ Chorus captivates from its very first lines. Written and directed by Portugal’s Tiago Rodrigues, the work takes the audience to the heart of the relationship between two people. It is a choral play, a lyrical narrative: the couple describe, in two voices, a situation in which one of them comes close to death. The two versions, told side by side, differ slightly. The lives and memories of two people intertwine in two monologues that sometimes become dialogue, converge and then part again. A Lovers’ Chorus celebrates love, vitality and the exceptionally strong bond between two people, in a situation where the continuation of life hangs by a thread. In Espoo, the work will be directed by Tiago Rodrigues himself. Jussi Sorjanen, artistic director of &, will serve as assistant director. Alma Pöysti and Elmer Bäck shine on stage. A Lovers’ Chorus is the fourth time that Rodrigues has directed this work, originally titled Coro Dos Amantes. First created in Portugal in 2007, the work has since had versions in other languages in France (Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, 2021), Greece (Onassis Stegi, 2024) and, in Catalan, Spain (Teatre Lliure 2025).